CARE’s Behaviour Tracking feature goes beyond collecting annotations it captures how users interact with the platform. When participants opt in, CARE records things like click patterns, page navigation, scrolling, search activity. Right now we save these statistics for the annotator and editor, and we are working on implementing behaviour tracking for other parts of the platform as well. Together, these signals give researchers a rich, behind-the-scenes view of the annotation process that surveys and final outputs alone could never provide.
Privacy is at the heart of this feature. Behaviour tracking is entirely optional – during registration, users can explicitly give consent to collect their data. If you prefer different wording, you can set your own custom privacy message. If users don’t consent, nothing is recorded. The data is anonymous and only accessible to study administrators, ensuring participant trust is never compromised.
So how does this help research? Researchers can study how annotators approach a task whether they work methodically or jump around, where they spend the most time, and when they seem confused or fatigued. This makes it possible to measure task difficulty, compare different study conditions, detect engagement drops, and improve tool design based on real usage patterns. Since all the collected data can be exported as CSV or JSON, plugging it into your preferred analysis tool is straightforward.